17 Replies to “The Beauty Of Publicly Funded Art?”

  2. “Cash Is Auctioned as Art in Australia — and Everyone Loses Money”
    Well, someone made $2500 on the deal

  5. Usually the middle-man provides the service of convenience or making the lot size compatible with the desires of the market (another form of convenience). Not so in this case.

  10. You know the art world is beyond hope when funded artists are coming up with even better ideas than I could to show how messed up arts funding is.

  11. Cripes. I’ve just spent two days slogging around the Monitor Mud Buttes with 60 lbs of camera gear in the hopes of making enough $$$ to fill the tank on my 83 Chevy Cheyenne and I come back to this. Where do I sign up to become a guvmint artist/whore? Sounds easier than what I’ve been doing. An added bonus is that there’s no effort or talent involved — just slap your name on anything and sell it.
    Nice work (well, the exact opposite really) if you can get it.

  12. It is always worth reminding ourselves that the important art
    in the 20th C in English Canada had much to do with private
    industry and nothing to do with government. The artists of
    the Group of Seven were commercial artists – very good
    commercial artists – who did fine art on vacations, in their spare
    time, etc. The exception was Lawren Harris, who was independently
    wealthy, and who used his money to support his own painting,
    advance the Group of Seven (in various ways), and ultimately
    after moving to the West Coast, to encourage Emily Carr.
    Then there is Vincent Massey, who used his money
    partly as a patron of the Group of Seven, but also to support
    the great painter David Milne (and not richly; but Massey provided Milne with enough to keep on painting).
    So much for the Massey Harris company’s contributions to Canadian art.
    The early art in French Canada attained
    high standards, but was of course entirely supported by the Roman Catholic Church.
    We might also mention Kenneth Thomson, whose tremendous
    bequest to the Art Gallery of Ontario has transformed that institution from a sleepy little provincial gallery, with a few
    good paintings, into a major art institution.
    There have been a few quirky bureaucrats who did good things for
    Canadian art but there is no reason to
    believe that the standard Government
    granting agency will ever, except by accident, do anything useful. Hell, even in the
    physical sciences they do more harm than good.

  13. An artist is a person with enough gall to call himself (or herself – politically correct insert) ‘an artist’. Real talent requires no government funding.

  14. This is the draggy tail end of a long artistic tradition, of which Andy Warhol is an exemplar, as were the Dadaists with their fur-lined tea cups. There’s probably a name for it, but being an uncouth gun hugging philistine, I don’t know what it is. They eschew skill and talent, going instead for “the Message” as they say, or as I like to say, the brain-f*ck. The thing about it is, all these guys basically exist as a reaction to and rebellion against the Victorians.
    An artistic tradition which finally appears to be dying. Now that Victoria herself has been gone since 1901 and the children born during her reign have all died out 20-30 years ago, rebelling against them is fairly gutless. But here they all are, gutless wonders every one, and critics are still finding their “works” to be “refreshing” and “exciting”, not to mention “important”.
    Soon to be extinct, I think.
    Myself, I like Shaker furniture. It inspires without having to do anything other than sit there and be 100% functional.

  17. And bidding stopped at $17,500?
    What kind of stupid people can’t figure that if they bought it at $19,900 they still made $100?

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